The Salt Pond Puzzle: Restoring South San Francisco Bayhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/44.13/the-salt-pond-puzzle-restoring-south-san-francisco-bay
The unintended consequences of the most ambitious wetland recovery project on the West Coast -- and the tough choices biologists may face as they try to balance the competing demands of rare species. FREMONT, CALIFORNIA

We were on patrol. Caitlin Robinson-Nilsen, a young biologist in shades and a ponytail, steered the 4WD Explorer along a muddy levee in Fremont, Calif., and I rode shotgun, staying vigilant. She surveys snowy plovers –– adorable, six-inch, two-ounce, skittering shorebirds, with black collars and eye-patches –– as the waterbird program director for the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory. But we weren't after plovers that April day last spring. We were cruising the South Bay's vast salt pond system in search of something larger, more dangerous. Through the windshield was a strange land of water and sky, rimmed with office parks. They're out there. They'll steal your lunch.

We were looking for California gulls. Trash birds, some say -- but that's only a partial description of their diet. They also adeptly hunt and devour the eggs and chicks of waterbirds like plovers -- many with a tenuous hold on disappearing habitat. Now, on the metropolis' coattails, the Bay's California gull population is going gangbusters. To make matters worse, 23,000 of them -- roughly half the Bay's population -- were displaced from their nesting grounds when the levees of A6, a 330-acre salt pond, were breached in 2010, returning it to the tides as part of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project.

The gulls were on the loose, hunting for new homes, and no one, least of all Robinson-Nilsen, wanted them settling near plovers. It was one of many unintended consequences of the largest wetlands restoration on the West Coast. Break down one barrier, others are likely to crumble. Restoration is seldom as simple as banishing exotics and promoting natives; it's a series of trade-offs, and the odds are that not every species will come out ahead. Nor is it easy to delineate which species actually belong in an ecosystem as radically transformed by people and invasive species as the South Bay. Still, this restoration, like most, is optimistic: It hopes we can all be winners.

Gulls are good at winning, and well-suited to human sprawl; snowy plovers, not so much. Charadrius nivosus is an undeniably endearing bird, found all over the world. But it's a nervous soul, unsettled by tall structures. Telephone poles? As scary as hills. Their subtle nest scrapes and camouflaged eggs are found only on beaches, gravel river bars and sand and salt flats, right where humans like to build high-rises and vacation homes, walk dogs and drive ATVs, activities that can disturb or destroy nests. As if that weren't enough, snowies also have to contend with European beachgrass and climate change swallowing up shoreline nesting grounds. And now, an explosion of gulls.

Two subspecies of snowies exist in North America, the Cuban along the Gulf Coast, and the western, which consists of distinct inland and coastal populations. The latter -- Robinson-Nilsen's charge -- ranges from southern Washington to the tip of Baja, but most reside in the Bay Area and southward. In 1978, both the inland and coastal western snowies became species of special concern in California, but only the coastal birds were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, in 1993.

The first statewide survey between 1977 and 1980 found snowies missing from 33 of 53 known coastal breeding locations. In the Bay Area, 351 birds were counted. By 1991, there were only 176. The low -- 72 -- came in 2003. Since then, the numbers rose to about 250. But this year, just 147 were spotted. The Bay Area is thought to host 5 to 10 percent of the entire coastal breeding population, almost all of them in the salt ponds. It's primo habitat: light-colored expanses to blend in while nesting; wet edges for hunting brine flies, using the run-stop-peck approach; and blessedly few people, since it's mostly off-limits to the public.

April to May is peak migration, and western sandpipers dotted every shallows. They were innocent. We passed them by. Up to a million migrating waterbirds stop in the San Francisco Bay on their journeys to their Northern breeding grounds, but Robinson-Nilsen spends her entire field season here, turning circles. Originally from Vermont, she discovered her passion for threatened piping plovers on Long Island. She studied snowies for her master's at San Jose State, and it became her dream job: "Anything to do with nesting plovers." She listens to the wind or to NPR, seldom bored. But as we zigzagged, she confessed, "I end up talking to the birds a lot."

When we reached the levee between A22 and A23 -- A for Alviso, a marsh-side community in northern San Jose -- there they were: A flock of roosting gulls, insouciantly ruffling their feathers, and ours, in the breeze. They're pretty snowy themselves, with a black ring and red spot on their yellow bill, and a four-foot wingspan. She counted them through her open window, jotting "110" in the California gull column of her datasheet. "Quite a bit less," she said.

But even one was too many: This was one of the bird observatory's "no gull zones." Earlier in the month, an irksome 700 had loafed here, right between two ponds with a handful of nesting plovers. "We were like, 'Oh, my goodness, we'll never be able to keep them off,' " Robinson-Nilsen remembered. The bird observatory began hazing them twice daily, and when we arrived, things seemed under control. "Once they lay eggs, they're protected by the Migratory Bird Act," said Robinson-Nilsen. "So we're putting in a big effort now."

We drove onto the levee, spattered with whitewash, chicken and rib bones, like the mouth of an ogre's cave. Robinson-Nilsen pointed south. "That big 'mountain' is Newby Island Landfill," she said. "Hundreds, if not thousands, of gulls feed there everyday." To the north was another landfill, making this levee an ideal midway hangout. We parked, stared the gulls down. It wasn't high noon, but close enough. On Robinson-Nilsen's command, we swung our doors wide and sprang out. She blew a silver pea whistle bought in Chinatown, and the sound carried like a battle cry. I wielded my notebook. The gulls flinched, scattering with a few resentful mews. Small, sweet payback, I thought, for all those pilfered hotdogs.

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Perhaps you've seen this place from above. Banking north toward San Francisco International Airport's tarmacs -- themselves built on former wetland -- the mosaic of rectangular and irregular ponds ringed by the South Bay's sprawl look like puzzle pieces, or strange agricultural fields. The more startling the color, the saltier the water: With evaporation, those blue-green with algae become saturated with orange brine shrimp, and later, red blooms of bacteria. Many ponds show the sinuous traces of former marsh channels.

The ponds exist because the South Bay is especially windy, which accelerates evaporation. Native Americans, the Ohlone, gathered salt for trade long before others sold it to Sierra Nevada silver mines to process ore. The first salt ponds were constructed around 1860. When all was said and dug, about 85 percent of the Bay Area's leg-swallowing wetlands were gone: filled and built upon, or in the case of the salt ponds, diked off from the tides. Just as the pond systems were designed so that increasingly saline water could be ushered toward central "crystallizer beds," ponds once owned by more than 100 small companies were eventually bought up by just one. The agribusiness giant Cargill still operates 11,000 acres here, producing 650,000 tons of salt annually -- 4 billion shakers' worth.

For decades, scientists and conservationists recognized the value of restoring tidal marsh, but only recently did a big opportunity present itself, when Cargill decided to scale back its holdings. Encouraged by local environmental groups such as Save the Bay, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D, stepped forward to finesse a deal. In 2003, the state, with support from federal agencies and local foundations, paid Cargill $100 million for land that included 15,100 acres of salt pond.

With that, the West's largest, most ambitious wetland restoration was born, spanning a triangle of South Bay pond complexes: the A and R ponds, owned and managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; and the E ponds, belonging to the California Department of Fish and Game (see map below). The California Coastal Conservancy leads an impressive coalition that includes these agencies, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, local water and flood control districts, and supporting science organizations like the U.S. Geological Survey and the bird observatory.

The goal is to return salt pond to marsh, providing habitat for species like the endangered California clapper rail and salt marsh harvest mouse, while improving the Bay's water quality and protecting Silicon Valley's high-flown but low-lying real estate from flooding. California sea levels are predicted to lift as much as five-and-a-half feet by 2100 due to climate change, and tidal marsh is the first defense, a sponge that absorbs storm surges and slowly wrings them out.

Once rooted, marsh filters runoff and captures sediment, so to a degree, it's self-preserving, rising and falling with the ocean. But the Bay Area's severely fragmented marsh and dependent animals may not be able to keep up with rapid sea level change. Thus, the biggest restoration -- on par, in size, with the largest in the Everglades and Chesapeake Bay -- is a race against rising tides. The estimated $1 billion public-private endeavor aims to restore 5 to 10 percent of the Bay Area's wetlands in 50 years, as part of a larger push to reclaim a quarter overall. (About $600,000 of that money, though, is slated for flood control levees.)

A6 was one of the first ponds returned to the tides. Dubbed "the Duck's Head" because of its shape, the pond lacked a "water control structure" (a fancy name for a gate), and after the winter's rains, it dried to a hard, crusty pan. Protected from raccoons and coyotes by a moat-like ditch, the 23,000 nesting gulls gradually sprawled like tract housing across its salty flat. But when Robinson-Nilsen and I arrived, A6 looked like ocean. Power lines crisscrossed the horizon and the hangars of NASA's Moffett Field loomed to the west. But in the breeze, you could smell the Bay's fecundity, its ability to heal itself.

When A6 will become marsh again is anyone's guess. Once, its bottom was at sea level; now, it's six feet below. The land subsided as agriculture drew down the water table, causing deep alluvial layers to dry up and settle -- forever increasing flood risks. Alviso is especially vulnerable: Some areas are 13 feet below sea level. A devastating flood in 1983 left neighborhoods 10 feet underwater.

"A6 is an experiment," says Cheryl Strong, a wildlife biologist for the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, which encompasses the A and R ponds. "It's going to take awhile before we've got enough sediment for the pond to be above the tide line. I mean, it's going to be aaawhillllle." In 2011, the breached pond collected nine inches of fresh sediment, but it may take 50 years or more for mature marsh to appear.

Robinson-Nilsen panned her Swarovski scope down a former A6 levee that the restoration project had broken apart and mounded into a dashed line of islets. In the long run, they'll provide dry, vegetative shelter for creatures during high tides. But until enough sediment settles, they'll be submerged periodically. Through the scope, they seemed bare mud, except for the marsh seeds and propagules we couldn't see -- and the thousands of gulls we could.

"There's a lot of copulating going on," Robinson-Nilsen casually reported. A gull flew overhead, hauling a stick for a nest probably destined to be flooded. By counting the birds in a single scope view, and counting the views, she estimated 3,000 gulls, just a fraction of A6's former colony. Robinson-Nilsen was glad to see them sticking it out, well clear of the snowiest spots.

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You can't blame the gulls. In the web of ecology, there are many knots that are difficult to untangle. Right about when the gulls first appeared in the South Bay, something unusual happened at salty Mono Lake, clear across the state on the dry side of the Sierra Nevada. Since 1941, the city of Los Angeles had siphoned water from the lake's tributaries 350 miles south to faucets. The lake dropped 45 feet in 40 years, and in 1977, a land bridge formed between the sagebrush mainland and Mono's second largest island, Negit.

California gulls typically breed inland, from the Great Basin to Manitoba. (It's the Utah state bird, in fact, the "seagull" that saved Mormon settlers' crops from a katydid plague.) About 50,000 of them nested at Mono each year, two-thirds on Negit, feasting on brine shrimp and alkali flies before wintering on the coast. But suddenly, coyotes could stroll over to the island. The gulls abandoned ship in 1979, settling on surrounding islets, where many remain. Negit became an island again, but it's still gull-free.

Curiously, though, since then a decline of Mono's summer California gull numbers has correlated almost exactly with the rise of the South Bay colonies. In 1980, the first nests were spotted: 24 gulls, on a salt pond island. In 1982, less than 200. In 2010, 46,000. That's nearly exponential growth: the myth of the inexhaustible West played out by a bird. The population likely snowballed in the city for many reasons; you can't pin it on Negit's land bridge alone. But the parallels are striking.

Now, A6's displaced gulls also have to go somewhere. "We don't really want the gulls in the Bay," says Robinson-Nilsen, "but we don't want to force our problem on other people, like Alcatraz and the Farallones." The Farallones, a cluster of rugged islands 30 miles offshore, are known for seabird rookeries with their own slew of problems. They don't need a plague of rogue gulls. And surely researchers would haze them right back around.

If the gulls remain in the Bay, the restoration team would prefer they resettle near A6 or join another existing colony, where their impact on other species is at least known. Call it smart growth: No new sprawl, only infill. In fact, the restoration team decided not to evict one 10,000-gull colony near the plover's primary stronghold in the E ponds -- E for Eden Landing Ecological Reserve -- for fear of further upsetting the status quo. "At least they're not nesting in the middle of a plover pond," says Robinson-Nilsen.

We were now driving a nine-mile loop of levees open to joggers. In the distance, the white, upswept tents of Mountain View's Shoreline Amphitheatre -- a rock 'n' roll pavilion whose lawn seating is the flank of another landfill -- mirrored Cargill's towering salt stacks. We stopped to survey a boisterous colony of gulls that had cropped up beside A14, just east of A6 and a good distance from the "no gull zones." Robinson-Nilsen counted 4,500 gulls, up from last week's 3,000. Since there were no eggs yet, we strolled a short way into the colony. I wasn't sure if it was a wise decision. "Of course, I forgot my raincoat today, but this would be a pretty good place to wear it," said Robinson-Nilsen. The gulls rose like a handful of salt flung into the wind. They hovered in the airstream, white crosses barking down at us. We were surrounded.

At first, Robinson-Nilsen didn't care for the gulls, but now, she says, "I find them completely fascinating. They're beautiful, and very good parents. I respect that they dive-bomb us and poop on us, and hit us on the head." My jacket was Gore-Tex and hooded, but luckily it wasn't quite bombs away. The gulls were still building "nest bowls" in the humped dirt, lined with sticks, minor construction debris and decorative items from the Newby Island landfill and beyond: chicken bones, Barbie limbs, and once, said Robinson-Nilsen, a plastic French fry.

Years ago, 20,000 or 30,000 gulls were said to have gathered at Newby Island, when the winds were right. So many circled above the refuse that employees complained of vertigo. The landfills became to gulls what refrigerators are to teenage boys or the moon to tides: Of "over-riding importance (to their) movements," as Josh Ackerman, a U.S. Geological Survey biologist studying the South Bay's avocets, stilts, terns and gulls, wrote in a recent report. In 2008, Ackerman's team attached radio-transmitters to gulls, and discovered they reliably put in a long day at Newby Island, arriving fairly punctually at 6 a.m. to meet the first wave of trash, and punching the clock with the last truck at about 6 p.m.

"I'm sure it's not good for them," says Robinson-Nilsen, of the menu. "Most of it's not good for us." Good, of course, is a relative term: California gulls are one of the few birds able to raise a brood on garbage. Yet the landfills haven't taken pressure off the South Bay's waterbirds: They've established the gull's home range right where more than half of the South Bay's waterbirds nest. In 2008, gulls snatched up a gluttonous 61 percent of avocet chicks and eggs here. Of the 212 Forster's terns Ackerman's team recently radio-tagged, the gulls digested about half -- worrisome, considering the salt ponds hold a quarter of the Pacific Flyway's population

The gulls' toll on the plovers in the E ponds is unknown, but given a Bay Area population of fewer than 250, any consumption hurts. In the bird observatory's office in Milpitas, Robinson-Nilsen showed me evidence from a camera trained on plover nests: A hapless plover flushes. Ten awful seconds later, a gull lands and chokes down three supposedly camouflaged eggs so fast the footage looks accelerated.

In response, Newby Island has begun an ambitious abatement program, employing a falconer, and pyrotechnicians in fluorescent vests and hardhats who fire off "bird bombs" and "whistlers" that leave hanging spirals of smoke in the air. When I visited, hundreds of gulls landed sneakily on a ridge behind a sharpshooter. Eventually, he discovered them, turned and fired. They sprang off, like plastic shopping bags swept up in a gust.

Barriers between waste and wildlife are expensive to rebuild. This program costs several hundred thousand dollars annually. At least it works. Twice a month, Robinson-Nilsen surveys Newby Island. The flock has thinned dramatically. "If they stop eating at the landfill, then the population will decline or plateau," she says. "And if that means they turn to wild sources (of food), well, it's worth having a few tough years for our birds."

But the South Bay's avocets, stilts and snowy plovers may face an even bigger menace than California gulls: the restoration itself. Converting pond to marsh will make the ecosystem healthier overall, but reduce the birds' niches. In fact, before the salt ponds appeared with their vacant stretches, snowy plovers probably didn't nest around the Bay's rim. They were found on San Francisco's Ocean Beach, in Pacifica, and around Half-Moon Bay -- places they no longer breed because of increased human traffic. Nor were nesting avocets and terns as common bayside, since there were few sparsely vegetated islands. Forster's terns only colonized in 1948, on dredge spoil islands left in salt pond corners. Like the gulls, these birds are dependent on the mess we made.

Should we worry about gulls seizing plovers and other birds if those species didn't live here historically? "When it comes to this restoration, as far as what were baseline conditions, there really is no such thing," Josh Ackerman says. "Most people would argue that the baseline state is the present." We don't know, precisely, the ecological equation of old; even if we did, the conditions that created and sustained it are long gone, and there are responsibilities, now, to additional agencies. In other words, the very word "restoration" should be taken with a grain of salt. Those redesigning the ponds are juggling a vision of the past with today's reality -- and moving forward.

Two options have been proposed: In the minimum "50/50" scenario -- which would leave many ponds intact -- only half of the 15,100 acres would be reopened to the tides. Since 2011, 2,910 acres have been returned to the bay, about 39 percent of this goal. But restoration leaders are gunning for another vision, "90/10," wherein all but 10 percent of the salt ponds become marsh. The outcome will depend on scientific feedback -- the kind of data Ackerman and Robinson-Nilsen are collecting -- and, of course, on funding.

For the gulls, the breaching of A6 was an ecological disturbance on the order of the Mono Lake land bridge. For other waterbirds that have adopted the salt ponds as a surrogate for lost wetlands, the restoration -- without vigilant management -- could loosely resemble the disappearance of Mono's wetlands, which supported millions of birds. These events epitomize the changing times: The first of insatiable thirst, without any regard for ecology; the second of an awakened environmental consciousness, with tough choices to make. Going with 90/10 would likely end the stay of snowies in the Bay Area, says Strong, failing an official restoration goal: to "maintain current migratory bird species." Thus there are "marshistas and pondistas," Strong explains.

The arguments for more marsh are compelling, however, in terms of water quality and flood control over the long term, and from yet another avian perspective. The California clapper rail might benefit most from the 90/10 scenario. Shy, secretive and about ankle-height, it's arguably the Bay's highest-profile endemic creature, a subspecies listed as federally endangered in 1970. Its numbers climbed from a low of about 500 to a peak estimate of 1,400 in 2006. Invasive red fox control helped, and so did the spread of an East Coast cordgrass.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers first planted Spartina alterniflora in the '70s to stabilize Alameda flood-control channels. It hybridized with native cordgrass and infiltrated the lower marsh, where it grows so densely it shades out other flora. While native cordgrass sticks to channel edges on the Bay's upper marsh, the super-vigorous mongrel chokes waterways and flood-control channels. The invasive spreads across the mudflats, reducing the foraging grounds of many waterbirds, including the clapper rail. However, the birds used it for nesting and cover from predators.

Beginning in 2005, the San Francisco Estuary Invasive Spartina Project began using helicopters, hovercraft and spray-packs to make coordinated herbicide attacks. Once the grass is eradicated, native vegetation recolonizes quickly. But much as A6's breaching spelled change for gulls and plovers, there were unintended consequences: Over the next five years, the already slim rail population declined by about 15 percent.

Cory Overton, another USGS wildlife biologist, has been slipping through the marsh since 2007, tracking these solitary birds. They're highly territorial, he says, so their population is tied "one-to-one" to available habitat. Each bird defends about five acres. (A major league baseball field is about three.) "You can't necessarily cram more birds into smaller areas," says Overton. "The best bang for your buck is new marsh."

Contrast that with semi-colonial plovers, where you might find a nest scrape or two every few acres. "Because plover ecology and behavior is so different, you can probably do more with less land," Overton suggests, especially if you keep out predators -- and keep humans at a distance, on trails. Potentially, you can also make new habitat, just like the retired salt ponds. "But you just can't make a tidal marsh where it hasn't been before," says Overton. "It has to be at the right elevation, with the right wave action. We can do a lot of things, but we haven't figured out how to control the tides."

We can, however, provide clappers with a temporary place to escape to during the highest tides, when they can be exposed and easily picked off. Between the Oakland Airport and the A's Stadium, in a tract called Arrowhead Marsh, Overton's group has anchored a fleet of "floating islands": platforms with small tents made of woven-palm fronds. Clapper cams have shown they're much appreciated.

Still, says Overton, "Everybody prefers a natural alternative to an artificial one." That means more genuine marsh. "The San Francisco Bay is one of the most invaded ecosystems on the planet," he observes. That's no exaggeration -- the estuary was described as North America's most invaded aquatic ecosystem in a 1995 report for the Fish and Wildlife Service, primarily because so many foreign bilges have come to port and released their ballast water. What's changed? "From mussels and clams and tube worms that live in the bottom, to the fish that are swimming through the sloughs, to the plants," says Overton. "You can't make the bay a pristine natural system," he admits. "But you can make it a functioning tidal marsh. That's still restoration."

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The stuff of floating islands -- of ingenuity and determination -- might make the difference for plovers, too. Whatever amount of pond habitat remains will need to be enhanced. Across the Bay, for instance, is an experimental plot -- "the bird laboratory" -- in pond SF2, nested in the R complex beside the Dumbarton Bridge: 30 giant islands for nesting and high-tide refuge. SF2's archipelago was constructed for $9 million in 2010 as part of the restoration's first phase, and what happens there will inform future projects. "At low tide, a lot of mud flat is exposed," says Strong –– providing forage for shorebirds. "And there are deep areas for dabbling ducks." In 2011, 154 avocet nests and five snowy plover nests were counted on the islands -- a real success. Then again, if you concentrate waterbirds, predators might notice. SF2 is far from the gulls' home range, but for similar projects nearer Alviso, says Ackerman, "all that effort essentially could be devastated if California gulls go in and depredate."

In general, the restoration project is trying to do more with less, and that, too, could buoy the plover. "They have been here for almost a hundred years now," says Robinson-Nilsen, and with little human presence, "this is one pocket where we can do something pretty easily to help them survive." The bird observatory has tried to help the birds by enlisting volunteers to leave footprints -- plovers nest in incongruities -- and sprinkling white shells across dry pond bottoms for camouflage. But they're still searching for effective, low-budget ways to improve plover habitat.

Ultimately, significant acreage will need be to left for snowies if they're to hang on, says Robinson-Nilsen, and those ponds will need to be meticulously managed, drawing down water in late February, while ensuring ditches stay full all summer for wet pecking grounds. The restoration plans to provide nine dedicated plover ponds. SF2 includes one such "nursery," which incubated 13 nests in 2011. But this winter, pond E8a -- where 60 nests were found in 2011 -- was breached and flooded; though it could be a natural fluctuation, 81 fewer nest scrapes were found in the South Bay this year.

The restoration is designed to proceed cautiously, as part of its adaptive management philosophy. Its plan outlines "triggers" for individual species, red flags that would compel the project to pause, reassess -- or halt altogether, even short of 50/50. Snowy plovers would pull their trigger by dipping below the 99 birds counted in 2006 before restoration commenced, or by declining in number for several years. "But we can't guarantee species will use the habitat we create and enhance," says John Bourgeois, the project's executive manager. "Birds do unpredictable things." This year, no plovers were seen on SF2's pricey islands.

The official Bay Area recovery goal is 500 breeding plovers, and 3,000 for the entire coast. Robinson-Nilsen thinks anything more than 250 is a stretch, though, even under the 50/50 scenario. "Where are the other 250 going to go? There's almost no habitat anywhere else. Partially it's that this target did not take into account the restoration -- the fact that their habitat is going to be cut in half in the next 10 years."

We sat in the truck for another hour, keeping the rousted gulls off the levee between A22 and A23. There were just 23 gulls when we arrived this time, and the bird observatory was going to scale back hazing. "One day, they definitely kept me on my toes," Robinson-Nilsen remembered. "I was so glad that this area is closed to the public because I'm sure I looked crazy." Hundreds of the rascals circled and settled behind the Explorer, again and again. An interspecies game of chase ensued. Now, the wind rocked the truck, whistled around its mirrors. "Last night," Robinson-Nilsen told me, "I had a dream that we found two gull nests on this levee." The nightmare jolted her awake. "But that's not true yet. Hopefully, it won't be."

Her premonition hasn't transpired. Twelve thousand of A6's evicted gulls conveniently nested in the adjacent A14 colony last year, while others were absorbed safely elsewhere. And oddly, only 38,000 nested in total. For whatever reason, many apparently didn't attempt to breed.

This year, the breeding gull count is 52,700, a new record. But the gulls didn't even show up at the levee I helped defend. Instead, they tried to seize several of SF2's new islands, which, says Robinson-Nilsen, "is the last thing we wanted." So the bird observatory resumed its patrol by kayak -- a little bit more challenging, especially since Robinson-Nilsen is currently pregnant. Every day for three weeks, she paddled out, blowing her whistle sharply. The birds flew to a neighboring islet. She gave chase, no doubt looking crazy.

Movement, you might say, is the estuary's only surety. After all, the Bay didn't exist until about 10,000 years ago, when the ocean first slid through the Golden Gate after the last ice age. The marshes didn't settle until 3,000 years ago, when the sea level steadied. Before the salt ponds, there were no snowy plovers, fewer waterbirds; before the landfills, and perhaps the Mono land bridge, no California gulls to harass them. Only recently have we begun to influence these tides, let alone become aware we were doing so. Yet now we help decide which species go where, or even which survive.

On the levee last year, I asked Robinson-Nilsen if she ever felt a sense of loss about what was once here, before we filled it in and blocked it out. "It's amazing to think about this landscape before all this development," she replied. "Wetlands stretching as far as the eye could see. But still, there's so much wildlife here -- it's just different wildlife."

Nick Neely is a Bay Area native, or perhaps invasive. After receiving a master's in literature and environment from the University of Nevada, Reno, he interned at HCN in 2010, and now lives (temporarily) in New York City. He sends his sincere apologies to the salt marsh harvest mouse, for devoting all of his words to the birds.

This story was made possible with support from the Kenney Brothers Foundation.

]]>No publisherWildlife2012/08/13 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleOn the prowl with Oregon's pygmy owlshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/on-the-prowl-with-oregons-pygmy-owls
Biologist John Deshler knows more about pygmy owls than just about anyone. Writer Nick Neely spent a fascinating day with Deshler tracking, capturing and measuring the owls in Portland's Forest Park.On his first Father’s Day as a parent, John Deshler is in Portland’s Forest Park. When I called several days ago, he was checking on a northern pygmy-owl nest site, carrying 5-month Henley with him. “My baby’s been good luck,” Deshler says. “I don’t bring her out here very often, but we did find a nest together. She’s got the mojo.” This morning, however, he left her at home. He was celebrating among the “pyggers” first, the birds he’s studied for more than five years. And at the second nest site we visited today, he caught a savvy female. Twice this year, he's tried to net her. To finally succeed—that’s a Father’s Day gift. Deshler holds her in his hand, talks to her like I imagine he talks to his baby daughter. “That’s exciting,” he says, in his deep, soothing Kentuckian voice. “It’s just exciting to catch you, girl.”

The 6-inch-long raptor, Glaucidium gnoma, is basically a glorified sparrow, “just a shaker of salt.” Deshler puts it this way, as he untangles her from his mist-net, because of her size, but she also has pale dots, like tiny holes, on the rounded top of her rusty head. “I want to get her calmed down just a slight bit,” he says, slipping her into a cotton bag. In his mid-40s, Deshler is tall, with gray hair, blue eyes, stubble on his face, and an REI ball cap the same cinnamon shade as the birds. Rustling and beak snaps come from the closed bag, a sure sign of agitation. “There’s a hole in there, but hopefully it’s not too big.” Deshler laughs; it wouldn’t take much.

She’s all fluff: Only 71 grams, when weighed in the bird bag, less than two-tenths of a pound, or slightly smaller than a robin. Deshler reaches inside with his leather-protected left hand. “She’s got both her talons sunk into the glove,” he says, staring absently into the forest as he searches for the right grip on her. “Don’t bite me,” Deshler tells her. “There she is,” he says, gently drawing her out, her head cradled between his middle and index fingers. The bird’s large yellow irises are the brightest hue in the forest, brighter even than the banana slugs. Her eyes are rimmed with white brows. Pygmy-owls are diurnal birds, day-hunters. When they perch, they flick their tails aggressively from side to side.

Deshler measures her with his calipers, starting with the culmen length, the upper ridge of her sickle-shaped bill. “Boy, she’s a big girl. That’s 11.25 for C1.” He shares the details with Ian, a volunteer who copies the data into Deshler’s yellow field book. “Let’s just make it 11.2. I shouldn’t take it to the hundredth of a millimeter. I don’t really have the precision.”

He has plenty of precision, though, when it comes to knowing pygmy-owls. Deshler had a successful career as a GIS systems developer and consultant, but wasn’t satisfied. So in 2007, he began to stalk the owlets in Forest Park for a two-year master’s at Portland State University. “I surveyed a lot of areas in the state to see where I wanted to study them,” says Deshler, “and it turns out this was a really great spot. It probably has a density as high as anywhere you’d ever find them.” In his first season of fieldwork, he spent 100 straight days here – leaving his wife “a sort of a pygmy-owl widow.” Since earning his degree, he’s held off on returning to work in order to study the pyggers full-time. “Long-term studies are the key to science,” he notes. And long, odd hours.

Deshler devoted himself to pyggers not long after he’d seen his first one because, to a large degree, they’ve been overlooked. “Generally, we just don’t know what’s going on with them,” he says, “what their population dynamics might be, threats to their survival might be, really even basic reproductive biology. They’re just kind of a mystery.” Consider that well over 32,000 northern spotted owls have been banded, and their reproduction has been tracked over several decades. “It tells a pretty sad story,” says Deshler, “but it’s a relatively robust story.” Not so with northern pygmy-owls. Prior to Deshler’s study, fewer than 200 had been banded across their range, in and west of the Rocky Mountains, and just two had ever been recaptured. But Deshler has begun to demystify them. He’s banded 90 in Forest Park and faithfully recaptured them at their nest sites from year to year. Altogether, he’s found 50 nests; there are 10 in the park this season.

At 5:30 this morning, I received a text message: “Wear rain paints if u got them.” Several hours later, we parked by a sky-blue VW van and a healthy woodpile. Deshler gave a theatrical sigh, then led the charge up “a heart attack ridge” through temperate rainforest, with his friend Ian, a volunteer pygmy owl stalker. Forest Park, for the most part, is mature secondary growth, a steep cascade of waist-height sword fern, seven-or-eight-story bigleaf maple, and taller but still mostly young Douglas fir. The ground’s so soft you feel as if you might fall through and vanish from sight. To tiptoe off–trail feels criminal, especially in boots. After it’s rained, the wet ferns wash your pants.

Up the ridge, we broke into a long clearing, a power-line corridor. Below them, a black-headed grosbeak sang powerfully, and a rufous hummingbird out-buzzed the lines' faint pulse. A western wood pewee breeee-d from a steel tower. We paused to catch our breath, and then continued up the ridge on a fire lane. Deshler carried two net poles and a couple of rebar stakes. “This is our way in, right here,” he said, and we scrambled over logs and under slanting saplings to a petite, picturesque drainage studded with columnar firs.

----

“This isn’t the redwoods, obviously,” said Deshler, “but for this park, those trees that approach two meters in diameter at breast height, these are big trees. Old-growth by any standard.” The place had “structure”: It was a complex patchwork of mature western hemlock, western red cedar, grand fir, Doug fir, maples and alders. The biggest firs were fire-scarred, perhaps a couple hundred years old. Below us, one cedar held an owl nest. Or so Deshler said; it was 60 feet up, hidden in the canopy, and you probably couldn’t fit a ping-pong ball through the cavity’s opening. Still, that’s larger than a pygmy-owl’s head.

We crouched in the ferns, waiting for action. In a short time, we heard the call of a male pygger — two plaintive toots not unlike the sound of a tugboat, or a truck backing up. “He’s just above,” said Deshler. To my eye, every mossy, rounded node of this park seemed, at first, like a possible owl. Dark leaves speared on branches? Very suspicious. It’s tough to locate a pygger that’s not moving, no matter how competent the directions. “You must have a really good neck, or a bad one,” I said to Deshler. “It’s killing me now,” he replied.

Then a female answered the male’s toots: a call similar to the trebly chitter of a Douglas squirrel, something the owl’s probably too small to catch. With rapid wingbeats, she flew in beside her partner. Spritely described her movements: Shakespearean, a faerie queen descending to her bowered mate. This, according to Deshler, was a handoff, or “prey exchange”: a rite that may strengthen the owls’ bond, and help conceal the nest cavity, which the male avoids so as not to attract attention. Immediately, he flew off to hunt again. She stayed. For several tiny but timeless minutes, I had a first-rate look, straight up, at her domed head and “long” tail, which shook when she called. Then she swooped to a fountaining maple, with what looked like a bird in her talons, and pressed the gift into a mat of moss, caching it for later. “Red-breasted nuthatches, Pacific-slope flycatcher, Pacific wren — all on the menu,” said Deshler. He's even seen one catch a swallow-tailed butterfly and feed it to a fledgling.

We continued our hike, up the fire lane to a BPA road that runs under more power lines, traversing a ridge on a muddy jeep trail. Eventually, we ducked off through the brush onto a former elk trail —illegally enlarged by mountain bikers, who even cut down trees to improve their route. It was Deshler who brought it to the community’s attention. Several years ago, he also stumbled on the cache of a man who had hiked in thousands of old Time and Life magazines. The hoarder had stacked them on wooden pallets, covered them with blue tarps, and created dry spaces underneath in which to sit (and perhaps read). The cops finally rousted him, but the magazines remain. Yet Deshler says his most exciting discovery in the park — other than the pygmies — was a porcupine: the only recorded sighting here so far. Deshler knows these 5,000 acres so well that, a few years ago, he was invited to join the Forest Park Conservancy’s board of directors.

Peeling off this clandestine trail, we waded through more ferns, scrambling down and up a little tributary, and stepped into the big-treed vicinity of another pygmy cavity, high up a dead trunk. “I want to catch this female,” said Deshler. “There’d be nothing that would made me happier today. Nothing.” He’d caught her in each of the last two years, but no luck this spring. After a minute, Deshler spotted her watching us motionlessly from a maple. But we didn’t lower our voices; Deshler believes that it’s better to act like a human around owls than, say, a researcher out to get them.

Even so, Ian served as a living screen to distract her while Deshler set up his four-foot-wide net, pushing the two pieces of rebar into the soft earth, sliding the two poles over the top, and stringing the net between. Then, from a homemade white PVC thermos, he poured two dark house mice, as if they were coffee, into a rectangular trap, and arranged green and brown fronds neatly around their cage on the ground. The fronds either camouflaged the ploy, or framed it perfectly: A live lure is “raptor research 101,” said Deshler, and late in the nesting cycle, with four to six growing beaks to feed, the females become voracious and daring hunters.

We hiked uphill, and waited. Fifteen minutes later, Deshler checked the net. The owl had moved closer and perched on a small maple, but Deshler wasn’t optimistic. “She’s got my number,” he figured. “I tried to catch her earlier this year when she should have been vulnerable, but she has me pretty well measured.” But then, when he and Ian returned to the net for another look, he called my name, and I jogged downhill, glissading through the ferns to meet her.

Now, as Deshler continues his measurements, he holds her tightly in one hand, calipers in the other. “You’re a big girl, aren’t you,” he says, steadying the tool. “My hands are a little shaky today. And this measurement is the one that matters, so I want to get it right.” The little bird is going cross-eyed trying to discern what might become of her and her five owlets—“pyglets”—hidden aloft in a snag nearby. “You just have a long tip to your bill,” Deshler tells her. “This kind of calms them down, when I measure it first. It’s like having the jaws right in your face. So, 13.6. Hang on, that’s not right. Ian, It’s 13.9, for C3.” Next, her black-and-white barred tail: “Seventy-seven. She’s a big girl.” Seventy-seven is far shorter than my pinkie finger.

“I’m going to do your tarsus now, and your wing last,” he announces, as her talons catch his sleeve. “Let go, let go. I like to feel where that bone ends, and then measure it.” The calipers stretch from talons to ankle. A bird’s lower leg, or shank, is actually its foot; what looks, to us, like an inverted knee is the avian ankle joint. "It’s a common measurement for birds, to measure their foot bone,” Deshler explains. “But in many birds, their feet aren’t feathered, so it’s a little easier. This girl, she was being pretty good”—he pauses to blow twice on her tarsus, puff puff, raising her wrist’s downy feathers—“but I need her to relax this foot a little bit. When she bends her leg, it”—puff—“screws it up. Yep, you’re just a big girl all the way around. 28.1.”

Northern pygmy-owls are on species of concern lists in Alberta and on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. When Deshler began his study in 2007, they also were on sensitive species lists in Wyoming, New Mexico and Oregon; however, that was mainly because little was known about their abundance, and they’ve since lost their special status in those states. Even though they’re not particularly threatened, Deshler’s findings have implications for conservation. His nest surveys have shown that, like the spotted owl, pygmies strongly prefer mature forest, areas of Forest Park with remnant old growth, a diversity of robust trees, and snags for nesting. Places with “structure,” where one breathes easier.

----

And while the pyggers are often found near trails and pay no mind to joggers and dogs, they nest as far from this peninsular park’s edge as possible, almost in a line down its eight-mile middle. That flies in the face of another assumption. “You can go online and read things like, ‘They are probably never found in dense continuous forest,’ which is just wrong,” Deshler says. The clarification is important in a region where the logging industry often argues that patchy edge habitat benefits many species. “They can see and hunt just fine without us cutting down trees,” he says.

Deshler transfers the owl from his gloved right, to his bare left, gripping her tarsi between his largest fingers, so she sits atop his fist—a safe, reliable way to hold a wild bird. Puff—he blows on her crown feathers and strokes them, touching up her head, nape, and shoulder with a single finger, like a painter might a canvas. She unfurls and flaps her wings, then leaves them draped around his knuckles. “You’re a toughie,” Deshler tells her. “You’re saying, ‘Man there’s three of these big guys around. This is not my best day.’ But my new net worked on you, didn’t it?” He slips a ruler behind her left wing, and she cranes her neck and gnaws on the tool’s head, refusing to unclamp. When Deshler lets go of the ruler, it hangs from her bill like the fat, rectangular tail of a steel mouse. Then clang, it drops.

“Come on,” Deshler says, “I need you to cut it out. Settle it all down, girl, and don’t bite.” This try, the top of the tool nudges gently against her cheek. Her pale eyelids half-eclipse as she cocks her head and, resigned, nibbles on the metal. With his right hand, Deshler smoothes her wing flush against the ruler’s edge. “You’ve got to put your tail down, sweetie, you just have to. Because I can’t get this right with your tail up. And I know you’re more than 88—I just know it—because we’re not getting your last feather. Come on, that last feather’s the one I want, and it’s way out there. All right, there you are: Ninety … 93 and a half.”

Deshler takes such meticulous measurements because he’s not just studying the birds’ habitat selection, but their reproductive biology. He’s noticed some fascinating trends: For example, though this particular bird may be big, Deshler’s research suggests there is an advantage to being small. Typically, Forest Park’s smaller females breed a week or so before larger birds, which, according to ecological theory, would provide them a long-term reproductive advantage: The pygmiest of owls can raise more owlets and, if the nest should fail, perhaps bring up another brood. Smaller owls might do better especially when rodent populations are low and they rely wholly on songbirds, like the Pacific wrens that twitter loud and crystalline through the forest. “They do that at their own peril, around pygmy-owls,” says Deshler. But a wren only weighs nine grams, pre-plucked. Tiny pygmy-owls might do better because they’re more agile and need less food themselves.

“Let go,” Deshler asks, one last time. “Then we’re going to let you go.” Like a falconer, he raises her up, to show her off, and says, “The false eyes never really look very good, when they get upset like this.” But they look pretty good, to me, these windows into evolution that stare out from the back of her noggin: black jack-o-lantern triangles, lined with white, upside-down V eyebrows. From a distance, they might well fool you, or another bird. Freeze, they say. “All right, good. Since we got all those pictures, we’ll let you go.” He finally stands, and paces off a few steps with her.

These days, given baby Henley and a bad economy, Deshler might not have made the choice he made in 2007 to study the pyggers: sacrificing a nine-to-five lifestyle in order hold something unknown close to his chest, for a while. He will go back to work soon, this time as the Forest Park Wildlife Study Coordinator for Portland Parks and Recreation—a job designed for him. But he doesn’t regret his time away from an office. “There’s really not much better to do than come out and research pygmy-owls,” he says. “Better than fly-fishing.”

To the bird, Deshler whispers, “You’re a beauty.” He extends his arm, relaxes his fist. Over the past few years, Deshler’s learned Forest Park drainages like the lines of the palm he now opens. He respects this place, and this species, deeply enough to let them go, and to share them with me. The big girl flutters. She flies. Deshler watches, and kisses the air.

]]>No publisherWildlife2012/07/13 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleAlien life, it turns out, is much closer than Marshttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/alien-life-it-turns-out-is-much-closer-than-mars
California's Mono Lake is home to creatures almost as otherworldly as the landscape around them. Driving out Highway 167 north of California's salty Mono Lake, you whiz by a jeep trail that heads for a crescent shore known as Ten Mile Beach. Few people find it, fewer still swim there. Once the bottom of the lake, this wide beach was gradually exposed as Los Angeles diverted the lake's tributaries, starting in 1941.

Mono dropped 45 feet in 40 years and, though some water now flows into the lake again, thanks to a precedent-setting California Supreme Court decision, it's only climbed 10 feet. Ten Mile Beach is mostly known for the alkali dust storms that billow off its surface.

But now it has a new claim to fame. In 2009, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA-funded geo-microbiologist, visited with her team and took mud cores from Ten Mile's shallows. She pipetted the samples into test tubes filled with a slightly arsenic solution, and waited for a cloudy culture of bacteria to grow. For months, she repeated the process, increasing the amount of the toxin in the solution each time, until what was left was a strain of Mono Lake "extremophile" -- not just tolerant of arsenic, but able to incorporate it into its most vital processes, in lieu of phosphorous. And this, you may have read, was unprecedented; therefore "alien."

Imagine if you were suddenly thrown into a chamber that contained only carbon dioxide, but found you could breathe anyway. In a manner of speaking, that's the kind of feat that the bacteria called "GFAJ-1" seems to have pulled off. Molecularly, arsenic very closely resembles phosphorous, which is why it's so poisonous. Cells take it up even though it then kills them.

Yet arsenic doesn't appear to stop the GFAJ-1 bacteria. Wolfe-Simon's team has detected arsenic in the bacteria's DNA, just where phosphorous -- previously thought fundamental to DNA -- should have been. No one knows why or how the GFAJ-1 accomplishes this trick, and some have criticized the study, arguing that the analyzed DNA wasn't adequately washed and that, in fact, there must have been some phosphorous in the solution. So the jury's still out.

But if ever such a remarkable discovery was to be made, it's not surprising that it would happen on Ten Mile's austere shore. In late-summer, great droves of green and beige brine shrimp wash in -- floating windrows that look like cereal. Algae-eating alkali flies -- the other visible denizen of Mono's harsh waters -- lie like a black carpet on the water's edge, their drone a steady hum. Some evenings, thousands upon thousands of phalaropes, a petite fly-eating shorebird, join together in whirring, serpentine flocks. The breathtaking landscape's not truly alien, or is it?

In some ways, Mono Lake simulates the chemical stew thought to have engendered life. At its lowest level in 1982, Mono Lake had an arsenic concentration of 17 parts per million. That may not seem like much unless you consider the EPA's standard for potable water is .01 ppm. Of course, Mono's water is undrinkable: It's roughly 2.5 times saltier than the ocean and full of sulfates, carbonates and borates. Slippery to the touch, bitter to the tongue, the lake has such high concentrations of minerals because it has no outlet. And it's as much as 2 million years old.

The view from Ten Mile Beach feels ancient. On all sides, mountains: to the east, the Whites, edging into Nevada; to the west, the Sierra, rising 7,000 feet above the lake; across its vast waters, the Mono Craters, the youngest mountain range in North America, a heap of volcanic cones and coulees that's erupted roughly every 500 years for the last 40,000, and is now overdue. This is a place over which the brutal elements rule. Most abundant on Ten Mile Beach are the countless quills from the 50,000 or so California gulls that nest on the lake each summer. Bleached white, they look like the discarded pens of all the scribes and poets who ever lived.

Yet now a microorganism may be Ten Mile Beach's grandest view, a glimpse, perhaps, of how the first cells survived, then thrived, in early Earth's caustic environment. If it holds up, Wolfe-Simon's discovery could suggest that there was no single origin to life. It shows, too, that while it makes a certain amount of sense to keep sifting through outer space for answers to the big questions about life, it also makes sense to search right here as well - to poke around some of Earth's strangest places - and thus to protect them, as we did at Mono Lake.

Nick Neely is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a freelance writer who recently spent two summers at Mono Lake.

]]>No publisherWildlifeWriters on the Range2011/02/03 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA visit to a ghost town in San Francisco Bayhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.21/a-visit-to-a-ghost-town-in-san-francisco-bay
The federal government has decided to let the tides take what's left of the San Francisco Bay ghost town known as Drawbridge.At the southeast edge of San Francisco Bay lies a town on the threshold of disappearing. Its actual thresholds are already gone. In the evening light, the chaparral ridge above Fremont -- a Silicon Valley city of some 200,000 people a few miles away -- glows orange through pane-less windows just a foot above the ground. In one cabin, an old bed rests squarely on cracked mud. In another, the flooring is pristine, glossy: water tiled with sky.

At its peak in the 1920s, Drawbridge -- on Station Island in the marsh of the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge -- boasted more than 90 buildings on stilts, at least one with a grand piano. Today, it's a quieter place. Beyond the hum of a metropolis unimaginable in the town's heyday, the only sounds are the chitterings of marsh wrens, the occasional clack of an Amtrak train and, high overhead, the call of a red-and-yellow Southwest Airlines jet.

Drawbridge got its start when a couple of lesser-known robber barons decided to compete with Leland Stanford's Central Pacific Railroad by connecting Newark, in the East Bay, to Santa Cruz, on the coast. Their line would span two sloughs on either side of Station Island. To keep the channels open to shipping, they installed two drawbridges and hired George Mundershietz to elevate them. His was the first address in Drawbridge, named with a sign in 1887. Before long, Mundershietz was hosting friends in his cabin, and then, for 50 cents a night, adventurous strangers.

Soon other cabins, hotels and gun clubs rose in the pickleweed and salt grass. Drawbridge became a real town, so much so that the north and south ends, Protestant and Catholic, started to chafe. On weekends, up to 1,000 visitors in suits came to hunt waterfowl and have a little fun. Rumor has it that one hotel boasted a wheel of fortune inscribed with the names of call girls. More likely, it was for gambling ducks -- you either earned a dollar, or your cinnamon teal became dinner.

By the '40s, however, Station Island began to subside as the wells and diversions of San Jose drew down the water table. The burgeoning city dumped sewage into Drawbridge's sloughs, while much of the marsh -- and parts of Station Island -- were excavated for commercial salt-evaporation ponds, inhibiting the tides and taking a toll on waterfowl, the town's main draw. The last human inhabitants left in 1979.

Now, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the ghost town, has decided to let the tides run their course. Station Island's ponds were breached as part of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. The West's largest wetland restoration project, it was launched in 2003 when more than 15,000 acres were bought from a modern robber baron of sorts: food conglomerate Cargill Inc.

There will be no restoration for Drawbridge, though, which is off-limits to the public. In the tall grass, the town's broken roofs sag like swaybacked horses out to pasture. Endangered San Joaquin kit foxes emerge from culverts, and burrowing owls glide beneath power lines. In every direction, commercial parks shimmer like mirages. Across the Bay, the monstrous hangar of NASA's Moffett Field -- one of the world's largest freestanding structures -- presides. But from this small ghost town, one senses acutely that it was all made to disappear. And that it will be as easy, in the end, as lowering a bridge.

]]>No publisherCommunities2010/12/06 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleDam removal for dummieshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.19/dam-removal-for-dummies
A how-to guide to free-flowing rivers, with illustrations from Oregon's recently removed Gold Ray Dam. Up and down the West Coast, people are discovering the joy of dam removal: From 2007 to 2009, 11 came down in California, nine in Oregon, and five in Washington, mainly for the sake of salmon and steelhead restoration. Here are a few pointers on dam destruction, showing the late, but little-lamented, Gold Ray Dam, near Medford, Ore. Two other dams on the Rogue River have also been removed, and another breached, in the past four years. Embark on your demolition with confidence and, please, wear a hard hat.

1 Choosing your obstacle Ideally, the dam in question is a bona fide impediment to migrating fish, as was the 360-foot-wide Gold Ray, a long-defunct hydroelectric dam. Steelhead and salmon, including threatened coho, beat themselves up climbing its outdated fish ladder and lost valuable time on their swim between the ocean and their spawning grounds. But renovating the ladder would have cost about as much as tearing the whole dam down, and Jackson County, which owned it, was eligible for a $5 million federal stimulus grant to fund most of the $5.6 million extraction. Removing the Gold Ray made this scenic river navigable again for its entire 157 miles.

2The cardinal rule of removal To tear a dam out, you must know how to build one. Fortunately, building a temporary cofferdam is relatively easy. In June, trains hauled in loads of rock and gravel excavated from elsewhere on the Rogue. Bulldozers pushed the material into a dam behind the Gold Ray's south side, sending the river flowing over only the opposite half of the Gold Ray and forming a small pond that was later pumped dry. Now, the real fun begins.

3Bring on the wrecking ball

After draining the pool created by the cofferdam, use a gigantic jackhammer to drill holes near the top of the dry half of the dam.

Insert massive steel pinchers into the ensuing gaps and mercilessly crush the concrete to rubble, from top to bedrock.

Employ excavators to shovel the rubbish into hulking off-road vehicles. (Tip: The cofferdam might groan under their weight; be sure to monitor leaks.)

Repeat as necessary, until half the dam is gone.

4What about all that water? If the dam has created inlets, or sloughs, off the primary river channel, it's safest to drain one at a time to avoid a deluge. Fewer fish will be left high and dry this way, too. At the Gold Ray, the cofferdam joined a sandy, forested spit that divided Tolo Slough from the river channel, isolating the inlet. After half the Gold Ray was razed, workers breached part of the cofferdam. Tolo Slough drained away, taking some of the cofferdam with it. (Tip: Beware of last-minute lawsuits: A vocal few -- especially those with slough-front property -- won't be happy.)

5Watch out for beavers Dam removal is all about adaptive demolishment. As Scott Wright of the River Design Group, an environmental consultant on the Gold Ray project, noted, removing a dam undoes "decades of stability." Be prepared. At the Gold Ray, a beaver had carved a den in Tolo Slough's spit. As the slough drained, water from the main channel flooded the beaver's tunnel, causing a leak in the spit. The spit quickly eroded, and the whole Rogue ran through Tolo Slough, weeks ahead of schedule.

6 Salvaging the fish When the Rogue River unexpectedly ran free, 333 miles of spawning tributaries became accessible. But some chinook smolt and lamprey were trapped as the reservoir dropped eight to 10 feet. The Gold Ray team jackhammered a hole in the base of the dam's still-standing north end, allowing the stranded fish to exit downstream. People with nets and buckets worked until dusk to scoop up floundering fish and tote them, swiftly, to safety.

7 Is that all? Not quite. By late August, just one triangular piece of the Gold Ray remained, looking strikingly like the fin of a giant concrete salmon beside the new river channel. Orange and yellow machines clawed at it like crawdads; soon, it was gone. Truck away all manmade debris; collect stray rebar by hand. You'll have to spearhead long-term restoration. At the Gold Ray, that will entail removing invasives like blackberry and "feral" grape, stabilizing banks, seeding dry sloughs from a helicopter, and planting trees like willow, ponderosa pine and white ash. But for now, Congratulations! Sometimes less is more.

]]>No publisherWater2010/11/08 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleCase in pointhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.12/case-in-point
Archaeologist Bonnie Pitblado uses a program modeled on Antiques Roadshow to introduce scientists to the artifacts collected by Westerners.LeeAnn Hartner strolled into the Utah State University Museum of Anthropology one Saturday in April holding a weathered 9 mm cartridge box. "I think I've got something real neat," she told the small, expectant crowd of archaeologists and enthusiasts milling around a table.

She slid the top off the box and withdrew her find from 40 years ago. Working on her cousin's farm in Idaho's West Teton Valley as a 17-year-old, Hartner had spotted something unusual climbing the belt of the combine among the clumps of sod and potatoes. She grabbed it, cleaned off the dirt. It was a six-inch blade of sparkling, hazelnut-hued stone.

People gasped and aww-ed when Hartner set the point on the table. One man's hands began to tremble. Bonnie Pitblado, the museum's director and an archaeologist specializing in North America's oldest Native cultures, virtually screamed.

"So, I've got something pretty cool?" Hartner asked, beaming.

"LeeAnn," Pitblado said, catching her breath, "it's Clovis."

Many at the artifacts roadshow knew at a glance that the blade had been shaped by a member of the Clovis people, the first humans to North America, peripatetics who hunted mammoth and other Pleistocene game about 13,000 years ago. The blade's craftsmanship was distinctive: Where stone had been chipped away, large flake scars, known as "overshots," feathered clear across its face and laddered smoothly up its length. The point was made of a strange volcanic rock -- welded tuff, perhaps, or rhyolite -- with square, inset crystals, and it had never been finished.

This was the artifact Pitblado had been seeking. It was the oldest ever found in the region she studies: southeastern Idaho and Utah's Cache and Rich counties. The area is the confluence of several ecosystems and boasts a wide variety of food and other resources, so it should have "a mega-record" of paleo-Indian activity. Yet when Pitblado arrived at USU in 2002, there were "exactly zero" known archaeological sites older than 8,000 years in northeastern Utah, and only about a dozen in Idaho.

So like some other archaeologists, Pitblado began holding a yearly event modeled after the ever-popular TV program Antiques Roadshow. Amateur collectors line up on the sidewalk outside the museum in Logan long before the doors open, eager to show shoeboxes and drawers of long-cherished arrowheads and pottery shards to the anthropology faculty, who examine, but don't appraise, their finds. The roadshows help people connect the angular, inanimate objects they squirrel away with the landscape's fluid, spirited past -- our collective heritage.

"I'm an anthropologist first," says Pitblado. "It's all about people. And with the Clovis, you're talking about the first people. It gives me goosebumps every time I talk about it. I think we all wonder what it was like for the people who really had the West to themselves. They were here with Ice Age creatures we can't even imagine."

Of course, the roadshows are practical as well. Pitblado could spend all her time systematically exploring the landscape and still discover little of archaeological importance. So why not turn the public -- the farmers and ranchers who know the land best -- into a gigantic research team? And it's worked: Pitblado has identified and photographed hundreds of intriguing artifacts at roadshows. In 2008 alone, her team logged 57 new paleo-Indian sites in Idaho, while also teaching the public how to properly describe and, ideally, GPS a find's location -- whether in a potato field or someone's backyard.

Pitblado hopes that Hartner's miraculous point -- which has survived 13 millennia, and the show-and-tell sessions of Hartner's four kids -- will lead to further discoveries. She suspects that the blade belongs to a cache: a collection of tools deliberately left behind for ceremonial or strategic reasons. The Clovis people couldn't count on always finding workable stone, so caches may have served as "insurance policies." Or perhaps the point's maker -- who could only carry so much -- left it behind when he happened upon something more immediately valuable. That also would explain why the blade's unfinished: It could have been fine-tuned later, as need arose.

This July, Pitblado and her graduate students will take their show on the road to the library in Driggs, Idaho, in search of more artifacts near Hartner's cousin's farm, below the Tetons. They'll start at whatever piece of ground Hartner identifies, and then slowly pace outward, scouring the furrowed earth. They'll use hand-held augers to sample the potato field's sediments for flakes or hearth remains. The odds of finding a cache are slim but tantalizing. In all of North America, only 20 or so Clovis caches have been discovered. Finding another would be a career- and field-defining moment.

"It could be the plow got them," Pitblado says of the theoretical stash of blades. "But if they're deep enough, they could be beneath the plow zone. This one" -- Hartner's prized possession -- "could have been pushed up by a potato."

]]>No publisherCommunities2010/07/23 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleAn infestation of the imagination, in a bark beetle labhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.11/an-infestation-of-the-imagination-1
Reagan McGuire uses the lessons he learned as a pool shark to tackle the problem of rampaging bark beetles.Name Reagan McGuireHometown Flagstaff, Arizona Vocation Research assistant at Northern Arizona UniversityOn his to-do list

Reduce automobile drag by harnessing the wind.

Attempt to generate electricity from rubber tires.

What his lab's recorded bark beetle "calls" sound like Fingernails grating across a window screen. He says Each of Arizona's bark beetles has its own quirks. "I call Ips the trailer trash of beetles. They’ll live in anything."

Halfway through 7th grade, Reagan McGuire quit school and became a pool shark. His father and grandfather were boxers, and McGuire, who inherited their taste for fisticuffs, turned to the tables to stay out of trouble. But he continued to learn, browsing voraciously through the public library, and 40 years later, while taking his son to enroll in Flagstaff's Northern Arizona University, the Pennsylvania native discovered that even a trucker without a diploma could go to college. He signed up.

Now a 56-year-old junior, McGuire's applying what he learned on the green felt -- discipline, focus and a touch of swagger -- to a different game: battling bark beetles. Under the guidance of NAU Professor Richard Hofstetter, McGuire's spent almost five years trying to use sound to disrupt these insects' devastating march through Western forests. The hope is that the beetles' "stridulations" -- the romantic clicks and territorial ticks created by their cricket-y leg-rubbings --might be the key to a less expensive and less toxic form of control than today's ubiquitous chemical strategies.

Shortly into his first semester, McGuire ran across an article about beetle kill in the Southwest, which hosts 30 different bark beetle varieties, 10 of which are particularly unkind to trees. Since 2000, roughly 80 million lodgepole, ponderosa and piñon pines have succumbed to beetles in Arizona and New Mexico. It's not a coincidence that NAU is a center for beetle studies. So McGuire dropped in on Hofstetter, then a new research professor in the School of Forestry, who listened gamely as the freshman overflowed: Could you use militaristic "torture techniques" to control bark beetles? What about "sonic bullets"? McGuire knew little about bark beetles, says Hofstetter, who specializes in them, but he invited the passionate, and garrulous, student to work as a volunteer in his lab.

First, they experimented with ultrasound, lugging infested pine rounds north to the University of Washington Medical School. But the waves penetrated only a few centimeters into a tree. Next, they used miniature speakers to broadcast Rush Limbaugh, backwards. (McGuire says he couldn't stand playing it forwards.) Hofstetter explains that some bugs are disturbed by the human voice and that Limbaugh's emphatic intonation is"easy to replicate." They also blared Guns N' Roses, hypothesizing that some '80s heavy-metal cacophony might discombobulate the critters.

Neither had any effect on the bugs. But when, with the help of the innovative composer David Dunn, they played back slightly manipulated recordings of the beetles' own sounds, the insects went nuts. McGuire and Hofstetter can only guess what, precisely, in the recordings knocks the bugs off-kilter, but it's clear that "acoustic stress" makes them debilitatingly aggressive, or distracted."You can't anthropomorphize them," says McGuire, "but I've seen one male block another male from getting to a female for hours, until finally the male did an end run and the other went off and sulked. It was a cock blocking, like guys in a bar." Some southern and western pine beetle males cannibalized their mates ("He rounded the corner, and just stood there," says McGuire, with gusto. "Then, he attacked.") Some beetles tunneled in circles, instead of their usual straight line. One female Mexican beetle bored through the plexiglass of an observational diorama that McGuire, inspired by his ant-farm days, helped design. She then rested her abdomen on the earbud of a headphone, as if to copulate. For an entire week.

A self-described "tree hugger," McGuire has a husky voice, a bleached mustache and an ever-present ball cap, worn even in the lab. If thousands of hours ogling beetles on a microscope-fed monitor are any indication, he's not easily sidetracked. At the same time, he sallies from one fascination to the next. As a young man, McGuire spent five years living in 19 different European countries. Now, enthralled with Asian culture and religion, he's studying Thai. At NAU, McGuire is majoring in anthropology, with a minor in theater. "I tend to frustrate the shit out of professors," says McGuire, who is always raising his hand. "And some kids call me the ‘answer guy.' " But he's not after a degree, really, and is currently on sabbatical from his other, "leisurely" studies.

McGuire says the lab has devised a "secret weapon," which he can't discuss in detail because it's still in patent review. It's essentially a speaker, strapped to a tree, which blares infinite variations of recorded beetle buzz. As a result, the bugs can't tune it out. Hofstetter believes the technology has a fifty-fifty shot of working. The real challenge, then, will be to make acoustic deterrence practical on a larger scale, in the forest, erecting a tonal fence the beetles won't cross. The researchers also have to ensure that their "sonic bullets" affect bark beetles -- all varieties of them, it is hoped -- but not other animals. The aim isn't eradication, either: Bark beetles are keystone critters. "Without them," McGuire says, "about 30 other species don't exist."

Before enrolling at NAU and "plugging into the neural stream" of beetles, McGuire hauled freight for Martin Trucking Co., driving big rigs throughout the Lower 48. He relished traveling and spent hours dreaming up screenplays in the truck's cab. But "creativity is an organic process," he says, and it's only so compatible with the road. Now, he's reluctant to return to that life: His hands are arthritic from years of shooting pool, and driving "beats you up." But if long-term funding -- and a dependable stipend -- don't appear soon, he may just have to.

So far, Hofstetter's funded their sonic trials through wildfire- and logging-related grants. But Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., recently called the lab, worried about the lodgepoles around Mount Rushmore. Montana ranchers and landowners elsewhere have also shown interest in the studies. At the moment, the researchers have enough funding to get through the summer, which they'll likely spend doing fieldwork in northern Colorado. But even the optimistic McGuire acknowledges that it would take about $250,000 a year, for at least two years, to see their vision to fruition.

Should stable funding materialize, or the "secret weapon" pan out, McGuire's dream of an NAU laboratory devoted to insect acoustics might be realized. (Beetles represent 40 percent of all bugs, yet we know little about their chirrs.) Then maybe he'll be able to tackle some of the innumerable other projects he has in mind, like working with Hofstetter to slow the emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle ravaging Eastern trees. Or he might finish a screenplay he's been revising for years, in which the protagonist embraces the idea of a longevity "treatment" in a grove of towering 2,000-year-old redwoods.

Meanwhile, there's so much to do to stymie bark beetles. So much to do, in general. McGuire hopes to retire, eventually, to Thailand, but asked if he's a practicing Buddhist, he replies, "Ha! I don't practice anything." He quickly clarifies: "I practice living in the moment."

Then, later, he confesses: "I used to do tai chi with a big tree every day."

]]>No publisherWildlifePolitics2010/06/30 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleReduce, reuse, re ... steelhead?http://www.hcn.org/issues/42.7/reduce-reuse-re-...-steelhead
In Oregon, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife carefully “recycles" hatchery-raised steelhead.Except for its aluminum shine, a steelhead is nothing like a soda can. Tail to snout, it's the length of some four or five cans, or about two feet long, with dark freckles and a rose blush down its muscular flanks. And when one of these mega-rainbow trout washes onto a cobbled Northwestern bank on its return journey from the ocean to spawn in its natal stream, it swiftly decomposes, stinks, and delights scavengers like bald eagles, microbes and willow rootlets. It doesn't sit lonely, crumpled, for decades.

Yet every winter, thousands of steelhead — each a rod-shuddering five, or 12, or even 20 pounds — migrate hundreds of miles upstream to Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife hatcheries, where they're placed into a watery recycling bin of sorts and picked through like so many bottles and cans. At the Nehalem River Hatchery about an hour and a half southwest of Portland, almost 2,500 artificially bred steelhead made the trip this winter. But just 60-70 pairs are set aside to parent the 90,000 smolts that will become the future run. The rest are eligible for "recycling," and once a week, on the curb of the river, employees sort the bin.

They sweep large screens through a hatchery holding pond, corralling these epic creatures. "Ripe!" or "Green!" the workers call out, lifting each fish by hand to determine if it's ready to spawn. With the squeeze of a thumb, "ripe" females ("hens") are relieved of their coral-orange roe, which is squirted into a bucket. Then they're released upstream to begin their out-migration to the Pacific, or, ideally, to the hook of an angler. Mature hatchery males ("bucks"), however, are simply carted off to nearby lakes, to live out their lives as bachelors — like empty cans swirling in an eddy.

The wildlife department truck pulls up when there are enough still-immature, "green" steelhead on hand to recycle. First, each fish is tagged — or simply hole-punched through the cheek — for the sake of recordkeeping. Then, 50 or 60 are dropped into a thousand-gallon aerated aquarium on the flatbed, and schlepped 10 miles downstream to the Aldervale Boat Launch. The tanker truck backs into the water. The stopper's pulled, and the steelhead pour into a stretch of river they've already swum. They mill about confusedly, then dart away. It's a six-mile swim back to the hatchery. During that one-day to two-week journey, Oregon anglers get a second cast at them.

As is the case with most artificially raised fish, the Nehalem Hatchery steelhead exist solely to be caught. But anglers don't always — or even very often –– succeed. Kirk Schroeder, an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist, estimates that fishermen brush up against just a quarter of any given river's steelhead. Far fewer, of course, are reeled in. (Steelhead have been described as "the fish of a thousand casts.") Still, many of the fish that anglers do land were recycled; luring both tourists and locals, they have a real redemption value for the Oregon economy. "We're doing everything we can to get (fishermen) another opportunity," says Eric Hammond, a Nehalem Hatchery employee. This year, he helped recycle 660 steelhead downriver; the hardiest among them were recycled, and counted, multiple times.

Sexually mature steelhead aren't recyclable because the wildlife department doesn't want hatchery fish spawning in the river, especially with their wild cousins. In an ideal scenario, all artificially raised steelhead would be removed from the river system each year, by hook or hatchery trap. Hatchery fish are genetically inferior, perhaps slightly inbred. They're designed to run earlier to avoid collision with native winter steelhead, and cradled in concrete ponds that are cushy, compared to a river.

Some worry that recycling steelhead might dilute the genes of native strains; that letting "green" fish linger — and possibly mature and mate — outside of the hatchery is a risky practice. One study Schroeder took part in reported that on the Siuslaw River, on Oregon's central coast, only one in 10 recycled steelhead were ultimately caught; over the course of three years, fewer than half of those recycled fish turned up again at all. No one knows where they went, but Schroeder says that the tributaries in which wild fish spawn certainly aren't "swamped" with strays. As with salmon, dams remain the biggest threat to steelhead in the Northwest.

Still, it may be telling that Washington state has canned its fish-recycling programs in all but a few places, in order to eliminate second chances for wrong turns and unsupervised philandering. There, anglers just have to look sharp, the first time around.

]]>No publisherWildlife2010/04/21 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleEligible mustangs http://www.hcn.org/issues/42.6/eligible-mustangs
In an effort to adopt out more wild horses, the Bureau of Land Management starts posting ads online.Sophie has long, wavy platinum hair, swept dramatically to one side. She's "fairly gentle," and comes from the White Mountain area in Wyoming. "She was somewhat difficult to start," the ad says, but "now does what is asked of her."

Ginger was born in Reno, Nev. She is "very trusting. … You can pick up her feet, groom, catch and saddle her with ease. Will stand tied for hours, and obeys riders' commands. She gets a little anxious around a lot of people, and seems to be a little bored."

Care to entertain? Since the Bureau of Land Management became responsible for wild mustangs in 1971, eligible horses and burros have been swishing their tails in government corrals and pastures, just waiting -- for you. These mares, and many others, were "gathered" from BLM land, where they often run roughshod over fragile habitat and compete with wildlife for forage. Hoping to pick up the sluggish pace of adoptions, the BLM now holds auctions online in addition to in-person sales. It's eBay in the true sense of the word. You can browse a gallery of headshots that beg your affection. Or at least the shelter of your corral.

Bi-curious? Meet Mocha: "This 5-year-old mare is a tri-colored buckskin pinto, a very rare color even in mustang herds, and her bi-colored mane and tail are mostly white. Friendly and approachable, Mocha is 14.2 hands tall and very sturdily built, with the heavy bone structure common to mustangs."

Or Flower, a "deep brown dapple" horse that's seen some tough times, but is ready to be swept off her hooves: "She has an old injury at the coronary band on the right front foot but it doesn't affect her soundness and is considered a blemish."

These days, record numbers of wild horses are penned up in BLM corrals, often for longer times than before and in crowded, disease-breeding conditions. This infuriates their advocates, many of whom see the very notion of capturing mustangs as cruel. Wild horse lovers tend to prefer contraception to roundups, but delivering the pill -- a dose of Porcine Zona Pellucida -- across the range isn't easy, and it's only good for two years. So the BLM has decided to concentrate on gathering females, to skew the sex ratio. The herds tend to foal like crazy, partly because capturing dominant stallions lets younger rivals have their way.

Humboldt, however, has left the dating scene behind. This 5-year-old gelding is shaggy, with an angular but sensitive visage. Gathered from the Jackson Mountains in Nevada more than two years ago, "he is very alert and attentive and likes to know what is going on around him. His training includes standing tied, being caught and haltered in a small pen … loading into a 4-horse trailer, and lungeing." Whoa, boy.

Bids for most horses and burros open at a mere $125 and can increase by leaps of $5 to $250 at the click of a mouse. Beforehand, you'll have to submit an online application affirming you are 18, humane, and have the space to support a symbol of the American West: "Please download and complete the Corral Sketch/Map PDF file below," the Web site directs. "Draw only the corral and shelter where the horse will be put ...".

The corral must be at least 400 square feet. Your bedroom, it should be noted, is not roomy enough.

]]>No publisherWildlife2010/04/09 07:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe smoke policehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.4/the-smoke-police
Simon Winer patrols the San Francisco Bay Area, sniffing out violators when poor air quality requires a ban on wood-smoke fires.When smoke curls out of an East Bay chimney and into Simon Winer's nostrils, he typically identifies it as one of three distinct odors: the waxy smell of an artificial fire-starter (such as a Duraflame log); the plasticky effluvium of incinerating garbage; or the spicy aroma of burning wood. Yet for Winer -- a tall, affable senior air quality inspector for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District -- the scent of oak or madrone is anything but therapeutic. Even the sweetest wood smoke is laden with "fine particulate" -- solids and droplets roughly 200 times smaller than the dot on this i.

On cold, calm days, residential smoke pools in the greater San Francisco basin, hazing the air. It's the largest source of the region's fine particulate, accounting for 30 percent of its volume throughout the nine counties of the Air District, and as much as 70 percent in Marin and Napa. When inhaled, these particles aggravate asthma and chronic heart disease. In 1994, the average household fire was estimated to result in $40 in economic loss, including medical expenses, for Bay Area communities.

Now, whenever particulate concentrations are predicted to exceed EPA standards from November through February, the Air District issues alerts banning the use of fireplaces and woodstoves unless wood is a household's only source of heat. "Spare the Air," it's called. Winer's duty, in part, is enforcement.

The regulation's most vocal critics find it "draconian," notes Kristine Roselius of the Air District. (Much to her chagrin, the Bay Area had to Spare the Air on both Thanksgiving and Christmas Day in 2009, a rather un-festive climatic coincidence.) Yet Winer, an inspector since 1991, believes that "people don't do the right thing until they are legislated into doing the right thing." Last winter, there were 11 Spare the Air alerts; so far this season, there have been just seven, a difference chalked up to variable weather.

In 1955, the California Legislature created the Air District "to protect and improve public health, air quality, and the global climate." The Air District initiated the Spare the Air program in 1991, but winter smoke bans only became mandatory in 2008. Similar programs recently have appeared in the megacities of Puget Sound, Wash., and Washoe County, Nev., as well as isolated towns like Telluride, Colo. Today in the Bay Area, 70 inspectors work to help suppress illegal wood burning -- at times by literally following their noses. Each inspector is responsible for about 20,000 chimneys.

Of course, the Air District doesn't demand Santa-esque dexterity of its inspectors; nor does enforcement involve knocking on doors, as citations are delivered by mail. Many inspectors, in fact, spend much of their time monitoring chimneys in two baseline communities to gauge how many people kindle fires under various conditions. Sometimes, their studies involve pointing an expensive infrared camera out the window of an unmarked Toyota Prius while coasting down a nighttime street at 8 mph.

"We control for weekends," Winer explains. "We control for temperature, control for holidays."

Spare the Air's outreach is extensive and, in individual neighborhoods, the bans' effects have been clear. Still, their overall impact on burning habits and the region's health remains to be seen. In 2007-'08, only 18 percent of eligible households acknowledged altering their behavior because of the Spare the Air campaign. But Roselius points out that last Christmas, under an alert, the Bay Area's air stayed below the EPA's particulate limit -- most unusual for a holiday.

During a wood-smoke ban, inspectors take on two extra patrols of two hours each in the morning and evening. On foot or by Prius, they cruise a neighborhood, sniffing out rogue chimneys. Often they drive to a high point to survey rooftops for telltale wisps. Like stalking hunters, they always start downwind.

The inspectors also follow up on citizen complaints. About 2,200 tips have come in this winter, leading to 301 citations. In one episode, a prodigious eucalyptus tree toppled in a certain neighborhood. Suddenly, the Air District received "a rash" of smoke complaints, and Winer soon came face to face with a stack of green logs just off the street, free for the hauling. "It was interesting to trace who got wood from that tree," says Winer. Like other unseasoned firewood, the eucalyptus produced especially dirty smoke -- thick white plumes that flouted the Air District's "opacity rule."

As Winer sat in his Prius one day, recording yet another eucalyptus-borne infraction, a man approached him. "Hey, I can see what you're doing," the stranger declared. "And I just want to thank you -- my wife is asthmatic." Such is the typical story, says Winer, of those who "rat" on their neighbors: One in seven Bay Area residents has a respiratory condition. (Forty-five percent of the region's residents claim they are willing to report violators on no-burn days.)

Winer explained to the man that his offending neighbor would be sent an initial violation, including a copy of the rules and the skinny on wood smoke's iniquities. Then he reassured the complainant that the Air District rarely deals with repeat burners: This season, there have been just seven $400 second violations. (No fine accompanies the first.) Nonetheless, Winer said, this specific case might take weeks to solve, as remnants of the once-towering tree have crept through the surrounding streets, first in the trunks of cars, then as all-but-invisible particulate.

Finally, Winer asked the man, and his wife, to be patient: It's not so easy to arrest smoke. But the chase is on.

]]>No publisherClimate Change2010/03/03 10:00:00 GMT-6ArticleOne long haulhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.3/one-long-haul
Huge trains have begun hauling uranium tailings from a site near Moab, Utah, to a repository 30 miles away in Crescent Junction.On Jan. 7, a train hauled 136 containers of uranium tailings away from the old Atlas mill site along the Colorado River just north of Moab, Utah -- the biggest load since the colossal cleanup effort began last May. Twice a day, locomotives chug off from a siding near the 439-acre site (130 acres of which are covered with tailings), a Cold War relic that threatens to contaminate the river. Congress has set a 2019 deadline for the site's remediation, but it might take up to 20 years to move all the hazardous red dirt, which emits low levels of radiation, to a repository site in Crescent Junction, 30 miles away.

]]>No publisherCommunities2010/02/15 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleCatch-and-release at HCNhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.2/the-intern-catch-and-release-program
New HCN interns Nick Neely, Lisa Song and Rachel Waldholz; former intern Cally Carswell returns; Marty Durlin leaves HCN to write plays; and thoroughly chilled visitors.A new and very talented crop of interns has just joined HCN. They'll be here for the next six months, learning how a nonprofit media outlet works, and researching, interviewing and writing stories for us.

A recipient of the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, Nicholas Neely arrived in Paonia after six months in a remote Oregon cabin, working on a collection of essays about urban anglers in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay. Nick has a bachelor's in environmental studies and literary arts from Brown University, and a master's in literature and environment from the University of Nevada, Reno. He's the founding editor of a creative writing journal called The LBJ: Avian Life Literary Arts (literarybirdjournal.org).

Nick grew up in Portola Valley, west of Palo Alto, Calif. He came to HCN to see "another corner of the West," and to write newsier pieces. Post-HCN, he's considering an MFA program and book project ideas.

Lisa Song ended a 13-year streak in Boston to come out West to High Country News. After earning her bachelor's degree in environmental science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she stayed on for a master's degree in science writing. That's where former intern Christine Hoekenga introduced her to HCN. So she left the City on a Hill for a town in the mountains. "I've never lived in a place this small," Lisa says.

Lisa's got the West at heart, though. Born in Beijing, she and her mother moved to Pullman, Wash., when she was 6. For her master's thesis, Lisa looked into land and water management in Pima County, Ariz., where she was intrigued by the pygmy owl, an aggressive little bird that's reshaping land-use policy in the region. While at HCN, Lisa plans to focus on multimedia reporting, which, she says, often feels more immediate: "It has the potential to tell a story entirely in someone else's words."

To that end, she'll be attending a weeklong training session in photography, audio and video this month through Chips Quinn Scholars, a program for young minority journalists. Then she'll come back and teach the rest of the HCN team -- or so we hope!

Rachel Waldholz escapes to HCN from NYC, where she recently helped start the Tremont Tribune, a monthly bilingual newspaper in the central Bronx. As the paper's first and only reporter, she wrote a number of articles about the borough's "fierce environmental movement," including its vibrant community gardens and the revitalized Bronx River.

A former pick- and chainsaw-slinger for national park trail crews in California and Texas, Rachel is excited to dig into the West once more — this time in search of the best stories. In her off time, she's eager to tromp around the Western Slope from Paonia, where, unlike the urban canyonlands of Manhattan, "you can walk to the end of the street and just keep walking."

Originally from New Jersey, Rachel was an English major at Barnard College. This summer, she plans to spend a month reconnecting with her creative-writing side on Washington's Whidbey Island through the Hedgebrook residency program.

Cally Carswell, who was among our last crop of editorial interns, returns to HCN this month as a full-time staff reporter. She'll be heading up our multimedia work, and will also write news stories. We're excited to have her back; as copy editor Diane Sylvain commented, "Once again, HCN's innovative 'catch and release' intern program proves effective — much to our delight!"

We're sad to be bidding adieu to assistant editor Marty Durlin. After more than two years of writing and editing at HCN, Marty left at the end of January to pursue her first love, theater. She wrote and produced an original musical last year, Babbitt (based not on the life of the former secretary of the Interior, but on the novel by Sinclair Lewis), and plans to enter it in a competition, as well as to create new musical plays. Best of luck, Marty; we'll miss you.

VISITORS, THOROUGHLY CHILLEDClaudia Ebel and Jamie Rozaklis stopped by on a road trip from their home in Boulder, Colo. after a night of camping in single-digit weather. "It was so cold we slept in the car," said Jamie. He studies linguistics and speech pathology at the University of Colorado at Boulder; Claudia has a degree in international affairs, also from CU Boulder, and just returned from a trip to Central America.